the problem is about why you decide to build your town so close to a pillar's spawning area, not the reverse
pillars spawn in a relatively fixed region and there exist structure designs that can prevent or force a piller to spawn in a specific piont.
to avoid this from happening you should either build your town outside the spawning region or protect your town with pillar-spawn-proof structures.
counting into the mob spawning region when you fight around a pillar, each pillar can threat only approximately 300 block in width, which is not likely to forbid you from building any of the towns in nature biomes even in a small world (4200 blocks wide), not to mention that you can always create artificial biomes to help you customize every teleportation station freely
also, as you only need to be close to a pillar once you destroy its sheild (you don't even need to do this if you have a long-ranged weapon, and usually you do have one), there is basically no reeason for you to fight around the town
I doubt anyone really thinks "ah, a new game, NPCs will need a home, better check the endgame Pillar algorithm on a wiki". Especially newer players.
On my small world, I had to fulfill the housing spacing requirements, place towns so Pylon spacing actually makes sense, leave a part of Biome unaffected by town anti-enemy spawning, consider if the evil biome is near, not place too high up because Wyverns, and even consider where WoF kill will spawn Hallow/Evil.
Now you're telling me I should have
also considered the Celestial spawning algorithm and also build a "pillar-spawn-proof" structure while I won't even see them until waaay later?
Artificial biomes either take space from other biomes, or take as of 1.4 a lot of blocks, again, not good on a small world. I literally have an artificial Hallow just between the Ocean and Jungle, and that's just enough blocks to consider it Hallow. That's how tight thing are.
You can protect areas from Meteors simply by having NPCs. And you can place chests to simply prevent spawning.
As for fighting pillars, sure, you can have fights as far as possible. You can also prefer drive-bys and Sentries. And a lot of stuff happens when you try to actually take down the pillar, unless you're cheesing it with infinite range weapons. And even spawned enemies can maybe just fly randomly off screen and kill your NPCs.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with Pillars, I have an issue that 1.4 Happiness slapped in the "space things out" only to have it shutdown by 1.3's mechanic.
I mean, I really can't accommodate the
entire Pillar's possible spawn area and fit a town, and that Pillar landed smack into the middle of a town.
